With almost 200 Euros energy costs per year for my 5 bay NAS, I thought it needs a little improvement. Mainly, because I only use it around 8 hours per day (depending on working times sometimes at day, sometimes at night so I don't want to set an on/off timetable).
As far as I have read, there are 3 interacting processes which could help saving energy. All of them could also effect the lifetime of a disk, which I would have to risk but still try to make the effect as small as possible.
HDD Standby: I thought about setting this to 60 minutes. This would affect the system waking up only 1 or 2 times each day. Do you think thats a good compromise?
Advanced Power Management: I'm not really sure how that interacts with the HDD Standby? Is it meant that APM is activated after the 60 minutes of the HDD Standby? I thought about setting this to 64 since I read that number sometimes before in this concern. Would you agree?
Read/write head parking: So here is another thing which I'm not sure about. Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that WD (I have a mix of different drives, most of them are from WD) has a power saving feature installed directly into the harddrive. With the tool WDIDLE3 it seems to be possible to change this feature and it is recommended by some to set it to 5 minutes, which I don't understand why.
I thought about deactivating this on all my WD drives so there is no bad interaction with the power saving settings of FreeNAS. Would you agree with that idea?
Overall I hope I can cut my energy settings in half with those settings and will measure the energy consumption after setting it up.
It would be nice if you could give me your opinion about those 3 changes I've planned.
As far as I have read, there are 3 interacting processes which could help saving energy. All of them could also effect the lifetime of a disk, which I would have to risk but still try to make the effect as small as possible.
HDD Standby: I thought about setting this to 60 minutes. This would affect the system waking up only 1 or 2 times each day. Do you think thats a good compromise?
Advanced Power Management: I'm not really sure how that interacts with the HDD Standby? Is it meant that APM is activated after the 60 minutes of the HDD Standby? I thought about setting this to 64 since I read that number sometimes before in this concern. Would you agree?
Read/write head parking: So here is another thing which I'm not sure about. Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that WD (I have a mix of different drives, most of them are from WD) has a power saving feature installed directly into the harddrive. With the tool WDIDLE3 it seems to be possible to change this feature and it is recommended by some to set it to 5 minutes, which I don't understand why.
I thought about deactivating this on all my WD drives so there is no bad interaction with the power saving settings of FreeNAS. Would you agree with that idea?
Overall I hope I can cut my energy settings in half with those settings and will measure the energy consumption after setting it up.
It would be nice if you could give me your opinion about those 3 changes I've planned.